Essays

Let’s talk about time travel.

When you hear those words, maybe you imagine yourself stepping into a machine, switches flipped, lights flashing, and suddenly you’re somewhere else, somewhen else. We’ve dreamt this dream for generations, not just out of curiosity, but from a deeper place: the ache to change time. Who among us hasn’t wished we could return to an important moment, speak the words left unsaid, or step onto the road not taken?

When I think of time travel, I see myself as a kid sitting with my dad, watching the Back to the Future trilogy. It is one of my most cherished memories. My dad, the sci-fi dreamer, and me, learning early that time is not the simple thing it pretends to be. Those movies planted a question in me that Zen would later answer in ways Hollywood never could.

Beneath our fascination with time machines is a longing to make peace with what has been, and to shape what might yet come. And Zen has its own way of talking about time travel.

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Dōgen and Being-Time

Most of us think of time as a container that holds us and all events: past, present, and future. It’s a very dualistic understanding. I live inside of time. It’s separate from me. I move through time the way a passenger moves through a train station, standing still while everything else arrives and departs. But Dōgen looked at that understanding and said, “That’s not it.”

For Dōgen Zenji, time was more than a backdrop. He created a new expression for his realization: Uji, often translated as Being-Time. He invented a new word for his realization: Uji, often translated as Being-Time. It didn’t exist before in Japanese. He combined “being” (u) and “time” (ji) because what he realized was too vast for the language he had inherited. One of his favorite phrases in Uji is “for the time being”:

For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.

For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.

For the time being three heads and eight arms.

For the time being the earth and sky.

It sounds like Dōgen is repeating “be here now,” over and over, but he is also pointing to something deeper. He goes on to explain:

“For the time being” here means time itself is being, and all being is time.

If we stay with this, if we really let it work on us, we notice that Dōgen is not giving us a philosophy. He is describing experience. He is not saying “time and being are conceptually related.” He is saying they are the same thing. You cannot extract the being from time any more than you can extract wetness from water.

And then he writes one of his most startling passages:

Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth.

This is not metaphor. For Dōgen, each blade of grass, each rock, each breath is the whole universe expressing itself in that particular form. And since each form is nothing other than time, each moment, too, is the whole universe. The whole thing, not a slice of it.

He deepens this later in the same essay:

Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.

That question deserves to be sat with for a long time. Is anything left out of the present moment? Your parents’ choices. Your ancestors’ migrations. The light from stars that burned out before the earth cooled. The words you haven’t spoken yet, the places you haven’t been. All of it, Dōgen suggests, is folded into this moment. Not as memory or prediction, but as the very fabric of what this moment is.

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Mountains and Oceans Are Time

If mountains and oceans are time, then so are we. Mountains are formed over millions of years: tectonic plates colliding, rock folding and eroding. Without vast stretches of time, a mountain is not a mountain. Similarly, oceans form drop by drop over billions of years. Mountains and oceans are nothing more than time made visible.

Dōgen developed this idea further in his Sansuikyō, or Mountains and Waters Sutra, one of the most astonishing pieces of writing in the entire Zen canon. In it, he quotes the Chinese teacher Furong Daokai: “The green mountains are always walking.”

Mountains walk? It sounds absurd. But Dōgen is characteristically serious:

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.

If you have ever revisited a mountain trail after many years and found the rocks shifted, the streambed deeper, the ridge line altered, you have seen a mountain walking. Mountains move at a pace that human beings have difficulty perceiving. But the fact that we cannot perceive a movement does not mean it isn’t happening. And Dōgen adds a sharp turn here:

If you doubt mountains’ walking, you do not know your own walking.

This is vintage Dōgen. He flips the script. The problem isn’t with the mountain. The problem is with the limits of our perception. We think we know what walking is because we do it every day. But do we? Do we know our own passage through time any better than we know the mountain’s?

Later in the same discourse, Dōgen writes about water in ways that break our expectations wide open. Water, he says, does not simply flow downward. It flows in the sky, it rises, it becomes clouds, it moves upward. The path of water is not confined to our assumptions about it. He is relentless in insisting that the forms we think we understand so well contain depths we haven’t begun to encounter.

And this is connected to time. We assume time flows in one direction, from past to future, the way we assume water flows downhill. But our practice invites us to question that, not as a puzzle to solve but as a reality to live in.

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The Ocean from the Boat

Elsewhere in the Genjokoan, Dōgen offers a passage that bears directly on our relationship with time:

When you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this.

Read that last line again. All things are like this. Our perception of any given reality is shaped by where we are standing when we look at it. The ocean is not round. It only appears that way from the deck of a small boat. And yet we mistake the appearance for the whole truth.

Time works the same way. From where we stand, time appears to move in a straight line from past to future, the way the ocean appears to be a flat circle from the middle of the water. We build our entire lives around this appearance. We regret the past because we believe it is behind us. We worry about the future because we believe it is ahead of us. We treat the present as a narrow bridge between the two.

But Dōgen is saying that time, like the ocean, has features we cannot see from our current position. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. Its qualities are, in his word, inexhaustible. The linearity we perceive is real, but it is not the whole picture. Not even close.

He continues:

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

This is the key phrase: your eye of practice. What we perceive depends on how deeply we have looked. An untrained eye sees the ocean and concludes it is round. A practiced eye knows better, not because it has learned a theory about the ocean, but because it has sailed further, looked longer, gone deeper. The same is true with time. An untrained mind sees the clock ticking and concludes that time is passing. A practiced mind, one that has sat in zazen, one that has watched thoughts arise and dissolve for hours and years, begins to see something else. It begins to see that what we call “the present moment” contains depths that our ordinary perception cannot reach.

This is not mysticism. It is attention. The ocean really does have more features than a circle. Time really does have more dimensions than a line. We just have to look.

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Awareness as Time Travel

My favorite Back to the Future film was always the second one. Marty McFly goes back to 1955 and watches himself moving through the past in the first movie. Wouldn’t it be something if we could all do that? Step outside ourselves and see our choices clearly, objectively?

Of course, we can’t spy on our past selves. But in a real sense, zazen is our time travel. Not to another moment, but into the depths of this one. In zazen, we are not escaping time. In fact the longer we sit, the more we realize that time is not something we’re in, but something we are. Sitting there, breathing, hearing birds, feeling the ache in your knee or the restlessness in your mind: that is time. Not passing through you. Being you.

Shunryu Suzuki once said in a lecture, “This practice is started from beginningless time and it will continue for endless future. Strictly speaking, for human beings there is no other practice than this practice. There is no other way of life than this way of life.”

When Suzuki Roshi talks about practice beginning in “beginningless time,” he is pointing to the same insight that Dōgen encoded in Uji. Our sitting is not something that started when we first crossed our legs on a cushion. It reaches backward through every ancestor who sat, every teacher who transmitted, every being who turned toward awareness. And it reaches forward into every future sitting, every future moment of waking up. Our practice is not confined to the clock.

And the awareness that zazen cultivates is itself remarkable. As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures who can notice the mind noticing. Trees and mountains can’t do it. Even our pets can’t do it. This capacity is rare. It is precious. What we do with it matters.

In the Genjokoan, Dōgen offers one of his most celebrated teachings:

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

This is a map of what happens in zazen. We begin by turning attention inward: studying the self. But genuine study leads to a loosening of the grip. We forget the self, and in that forgetting, the world rushes in to meet us. We don’t need to travel anywhere. The whole universe arrives.

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A Living Example: Whitney Houston and Calum Scott

One of my favorite lines from Uji is: “Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

I’m going to attempt to offer a simple example of this teaching, which sounds abstract at first, but it points to something deeply rooted in actual experience. Fundamentally, it points to the interdependence of all moments.

In September 2025, Calum Scott released a duet version of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” with Whitney Houston to mark the fortieth anniversary of Houston’s music career. Whitney recorded her part in 1985. She died over thirteen years ago. Calum recorded his part earlier this year.

I listened to the song a few weeks ago. Whitney’s voice from 1985 came through my headphones, and then Calum Scott’s voice rose up to meet hers. And there I was, sitting in my kitchen in 2025, hearing them together as if they were in the same room. It did not feel like three separate times. It felt like one complete moment.

And there is something else here. Whitney recorded that song with the intention that someone in the future would hear it. Calum Scott did the same almost forty years later. Neither would have walked into the studio without the presence of future listeners shaping their choices.

In a real sense, the future influenced the past. Their intention reached forward. Our listening reaches backward. The moment they created and the moment we live in meet right here.

Dōgen writes something in Uji that speaks directly to this:

Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand the time-being is that you think of time only as passing.

We tend to think that 1985 is gone. That Whitney’s voice belongs to the past. But Dōgen insists we not reduce time to mere passage. Whitney’s voice, arriving in our ears right now, is present. It is not a ghost of 1985. It is this moment, fully. Past and future are not somewhere else. They are alive in this moment.

Dōgen continues: “The time-being has the quality of flowing. So-called today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today.” Notice that. Yesterday flows into today, but today also flows into yesterday. Time does not move in one direction only. It interpenetrates. The future shapes the past as surely as the past shapes the future.

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The Whole Works

There is a short fascicle of the Shobogenzo called Zenki, which translates roughly as “the whole works” or “total dynamic working.” In it, Dōgen writes that life is the total manifestation of life, and death is the total manifestation of death. Nothing is partial. When you are alive, every fiber of reality is alive. When a moment arrives, every fiber of reality is that moment.

This connects directly to Uji. If each moment is the entire world, then nothing in your experience right now is accidental or incomplete. The sound of traffic outside, the weight of this device in your hands, the slight tension in your shoulders, the fact that you are reading these particular words at this particular second: all of it is the whole works, the entire universe showing up as your life.

In the Shoji fascicle, which deals with birth and death, Dōgen draws a related conclusion:

Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought.

This is as radical as anything in the Buddhist tradition. We do not practice to arrive at some timeless realm beyond the mess of living and dying. We practice to meet this life fully. Birth-and-death, which is to say our ordinary moment-to-moment experience, is not the obstacle. It is the path. It is, in Dōgen’s language, already nirvana.

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Science Fiction and Being-Time

Physicists have noticed something similar to what Dōgen describes. In certain quantum experiments, such as one called the delayed-choice quantum eraser, a choice made in the present appears to influence how a particle behaved in the past. Some call it retrocausality: the future rippling backward.

The experiment works by observing entangled particles. When a measurement is made on one particle, it retroactively determines the behavior pattern of its partner, even when the partner’s behavior was recorded earlier. The “choice” of what to measure seems to reach backward through time. Scientists debate furiously what this means. Some say it is a measurement artifact. Others believe it reveals something fundamental about the nature of time itself.

I am not a physicist, and I do not want to overstate the parallel. But it is striking that our most advanced instruments are beginning to glimpse what Dōgen saw through zazen: past, present, and future are not separate things. Each gives rise to the others. The universe is not a sequence of frames playing one after another. It is, as the tradition suggests, one bright pearl.

Dōgen uses that image, ikka myoju, “one bright pearl,” as the title of another fascicle. The whole universe is one bright pearl, he says. Not many pieces. Not past and present and future strung together like beads. One pearl. Whole and luminous.

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Ethical Time Travel

Dōgen also writes in Uji:

The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time. Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.

Because we are time, our choices matter. Each moment is a complete and unique universe. This moment holds our parents, teachers, ancestors, and the dreams we haven’t even dreamt yet. It holds mountains forming and oceans deepening. In fact, this moment is the whole universe arriving as you.

And because it is complete, it carries moral weight. How we show up in this moment is how we show up in the universe. There is nowhere to hide, no future moment where we can deposit the work we’re avoiding now. As Dōgen says, “Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being. Do not mistakenly confuse it as nonbeing. Do not forcefully assert it as being.”

The middle way here is striking. We do not deny this moment, and we do not grasp at it. We meet it.

This makes me think of the Jukai and Shukke Tokudo ceremonies, where we say, “Everything is new.” Not symbolically. Literally. This moment has never happened before and will never happen again. The precepts we receive, the robes we put on, the vows we make are not things we collect and store away. They are alive only in the moment of their expression. Practice is not something we did yesterday or will do tomorrow. It is this.

Shunryu Suzuki, in a lecture from December 1965, put it this way: “So whatever we do that is practice. That is Zen.” He was not being loose or casual. He was being precise. If each moment is the total expression of being-time, then there is no moment that falls outside of practice. Cooking breakfast is practice. Tying your shoes is practice. Arguing with your partner is practice. Not because these activities are spiritually elevated, but because they are real. They are the whole works.

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The Moon in the Water

Dōgen uses another image in the Genjokoan that deepens everything we’ve been discussing. He writes:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

The moon does not shrink to fit in the dewdrop. The dewdrop does not expand to hold the moon. And yet the whole moon is there. This is Dōgen’s way of talking about how the infinite meets the finite. Each moment of our lives, however small, contains the whole of reality. Not as a reduction, but as a complete expression.

If you are sitting zazen right now and your knee aches, that ache is the whole universe. If you are reading this on a train, the rattling beneath you is the whole universe. Not because these experiences are special, but because nothing is excluded from the present moment.

The moon-in-water image also points to something about our relationship to time. We think we need more time, better time, time we haven’t wasted. But the whole moon is already in the dewdrop. The whole of your life is already in this breath. You cannot add to it by accumulation, and you cannot subtract from it by distraction. You can only meet it or miss it.

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The Green Mountains Are Still Walking

There is a passage in Sansuikyo where Dōgen says something that has stayed with me since I first encountered it:

Although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to the people who love them.

I love this line because it breaks through any sense that our relationship with the world is abstract or transactional. Mountains belong to those who love them. Time belongs to those who attend to it. The universe belongs to those who show up.

This is not ownership. It is intimacy. When you sit zazen, you are intimate with time. When you walk through a forest, you are intimate with mountains. And that intimacy is itself the practice.

Dōgen goes further. He says that when wise people and sages enter the mountains, “not a single person meets another. There is just the activity of the mountains.” In other words, the distinction between person and mountain dissolves. When you are fully present in a place, you are not separate from it. You are its activity. It is yours.

This is exactly what happens in zazen. We sit, and at first there is a person sitting. But if we stay, if we keep sitting, the person dissolves a little and what remains is just sitting. Just breathing. Just the hum of the room and the light through the window and the faint sound of traffic. Not me sitting in time, but time sitting as me.

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Closing

So yes, we are all time travelers. Not like Marty and Doc, not with flux capacitors humming at 88 miles per hour.

We travel through time simply by being alive. Awareness is the vehicle. Not something that transports us elsewhere, but something that reveals where we already are.

Dōgen’s entire project, the thousand pages of the Shobogenzo, the years of sitting and teaching and walking in the mountains of medieval Japan, comes down to this: This moment is the whole thing. Not a fraction. Not a rehearsal. Not a waypoint. The whole thing.

Maybe we don’t need a time machine after all. Maybe our practice is the time machine. When we sit, we touch our entire lives: past, present, future, mountains, oceans, ancestors, and descendants, all right here. The firewood is complete as firewood. The ash is complete as ash. Whitney’s voice is complete in 1985 and complete in your kitchen in 2025. The mountain is walking. The water is flowing upward. The green earth has never stopped its turning.

The real journey doesn’t take us back to 1955 or forward to 2015, where there is a shocking lack of the hover cars we were promised. So for the time being, stand wherever you are: on the highest peak, at the bottom of the deepest ocean, in your kitchen, on the bus, at the dentist’s office, in the zendo.

Be where you are. Where, or when, else could you possibly be?

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Want to read more? Start here.

On Chihuahuas, violets, and Zen Self-Acceptance

No one prepares you for life with a Chihuahua.

Our dog, Eevee, weighs less than a sack of flour but struts around the house with the confidence of a drunk Viking. She barks at clouds. She growls at the printer. In her mind, she is a Great Dane.

She also loves us fiercely. Unconditionally. She demands that her tummy and chest be worshipped at regular intervals throughout the day, and she lets us know when it’s time. She is, without question, completely herself.

But she is also always trying to be something more. Tougher. Bigger. Scarier. She has this tiny, squeaky bark that sounds more like a chew toy than a threat, yet she puts her whole heart into it. Like a young Simba roaring at the hyenas. And watching her, I cannot help but think: aren’t we all a little like that?

I gave a dharma talk about this recently, early on a Saturday morning before my house woke up. Four kids, a spouse, and Eevee make for a full life, and the zendo before dawn was the quietest room I’d been in all week. What follows is an expanded version of what I offered that morning, woven together with teachings that have stayed close to me in the weeks since. At its heart, this is an exploration of Zen self-acceptance: what it means to stop treating ourselves as unfinished projects and begin inhabiting the lives already unfolding through us.

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The Violet’s Mistake

We are, in our own strange ways, completely ourselves. And at the same time, always trying to be something else. We want to look calmer, be more confident, more disciplined, more enlightened. We watch how someone else walks into the zendo, or how still they sit, or how gently they speak, and think: that’s how I should be.

So often we come to the cushion hoping to fix something. But where is the flaw? What is it that’s lacking?

This is where Zen self-acceptance begins. It begins with the possibility that practice is less about repairing a defective self and more about meeting this life without turning away.

There is a passage from Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi that has become a kind of compass for me. Uchiyama was the abbot of Antaiji temple near Kyoto, a disciple of the great Kōdō Sawaki Roshi, and a man whose teaching combined rigorous zazen practice with a deep tenderness for ordinary human life. He writes:

It’s meaningless for a violet to think being a violet isn’t good enough, that you should work hard to produce a rose. However, if a violet doesn’t become a violet, you spoil your life force. This is absurd. Try to express your life force to the fullest. Life is possibility; it’s not fixed. You don’t need to decide what you are. Just live your self and naturally bloom your own flower.

A rose and a violet are both beautiful, but completely different. You would not expect a violet to stretch its petals into the shape of a rose, or a rose to grow close to the ground like a violet. You simply let them be what they are.

That phrase, “you spoil your life force,” points to something urgent. Not life force as some mystical substance, but the plain, real aliveness always moving through us: breathing, sensing, responding, growing. It is not something you have to earn. It is already here.

Zen self-acceptance is not resignation or complacency. It is the willingness to begin with reality, to let the violet be a violet and then allow it to express its life completely.

Sawaki Roshi, Uchiyama’s teacher, put the same insight more bluntly. No one can live your life for you. You cannot hand off your experience to someone else any more than you can hand off your breath. There is no need to compare yourself with others.

Sawaki was known as “Homeless Kōdō” because he never had a temple of his own. He spent decades wandering from monastery to monastery, sitting zazen and offering talks in the kind of plain Japanese that made sophisticated Buddhist scholars uncomfortable. For him, zazen was the act of making the self into the self, of becoming familiar with who you already are. Not more. Just that.

Making the self into the self. Not remaking the self into something better. Not sculpting it into an image borrowed from someone else’s practice. Simply allowing the self to settle as the self.

This is Zen self-acceptance in its simplest form: the self becoming intimate with the self, without comparison and without disguise.

ething better. Not sculpting it into an image borrowed from someone else’s practice. Simply allowing the self to settle as the self.

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The Chained Dog

In The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kōdō, Uchiyama tells a story about his early years as a begging monk. He was a beggar by necessity, having inherited his teacher’s “homeless” way of life, and he spent his days being barked at by dogs. One day a spitz went wild at him, growling and leaping as if it wanted to tear him apart. Suddenly the collar chain broke. The dog immediately cowered and whined.

Uchiyama observed that the dog was fierce only while chained. The moment it was free, all that ferocity collapsed into whimpering. He saw the same pattern in people. We posture and threaten when backed by money, titles, or institutions. Strip those away and we shrink. But each of us, underneath all that borrowed armor, is just a person living alone, majestically. No chains required.

I think of this story whenever I think of Eevee. She, too, is fiercest when she feels backed by the couch cushions or perched on the highest piece of furniture in the room. But her ferocity is endearing because it is completely honest. She is not pretending to be powerful for anyone’s benefit. She is just being Eevee, doing what Eevee does.

How much of our own striving is like this? How many of our growls are borrowed from circumstances we mistake for our own power? And how many of our fears are borrowed too, inherited from some idea of what we should be, rather than what we are?

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The Jackal and the Lion

Sawaki’s teaching on “True Religion” takes up this theme directly, by way of the Nirvana Sutra. A jackal can spend a hundred years, a thousand years, trying to imitate the lion’s roar, and never find its voice. But a three-year-old lion cub roars naturally, just like its parents. The point, for Sawaki, is not that some of us are lions and some are jackals. It is that the Dharma teaches you how to find your own voice, whatever it sounds like. Whether roaring or meowing, if it is your true nature, it is a life that works for the good of all.

This is the teaching at the heart of the violet and the rose, at the heart of Eevee’s squeaky bark. Whether roaring or meowing. Whether blooming tall or close to the ground. Whether sitting in perfect stillness or fidgeting with a restless mind. What matters is the authenticity of the expression, not its impressiveness.

Too often, Sawaki says, people are in a hurry to become the next thing. The servant wants to be the boss. The student wants to be the teacher. The person on the cushion wants to be the person who no longer needs the cushion. And so we miss it. We miss the life that is right here, right now, being lived.

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Who Would You Be?

This hits me on a very personal level. If I am honest, I have spent much of my life chasing achievement. First it was academics, then my career. I have tied my sense of worth to what I have accomplished. And sometimes I wonder: who would I be if I had never been allowed to accomplish anything at all, and still could not? Who would you be if you could not?

I watch my daughters, driven as I once was, and I wonder: have I passed down the habit of tying worth to achievement? Or can I point them toward something different, that their aliveness is already everything, that there is a fulfillment inherent in simply being?

We hear so much about miracles. But the real miracle is not something rare or supernatural. It is the simple fact that we exist at all: alive, conscious, and able to contemplate these very questions. And yet, even in the midst of that miracle, we so easily forget. We shrink our lives down to comparison, trying to sit like someone else, speak like someone else, live like someone else. And then we tell ourselves we are not enough. We look in the mirror and say, “You’re a failure.” I am not speaking from experience or anything. Except I am.

We choke that life force off. We contort ourselves trying to be some other kind of flower. Or in Eevee’s case, some other kind of dog. She will never be a Great Dane, no matter how high she climbs on the furniture or how loud she thinks she is barking. But if she stopped being Eevee, if she tried to suppress her wild little heart, she would lose everything that makes her shine.

You will never be anyone else but you. And that is a truly wonderful thing.

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Studying the Self

Dōgen Zenji, the thirteenth-century founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen, wrote what is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of Zen literature. It appears in the Genjōkōan, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi as “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” the opening fascicle of his masterwork Shōbōgenzō:

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

I have returned to this passage hundreds of times, and it never stops opening. What strikes me now is the direction of the movement. We begin by studying the self, yes. But the path does not end with self-knowledge. It moves through self-knowledge into self-forgetting, and from self-forgetting into a kind of radical intimacy with everything.

To forget the self is not to become a blank. It is to stop holding the self apart as a separate project. When you stop treating yourself as a problem to be solved, something remarkable happens: the world rushes in. You hear the birds. You feel the weight of your own body on the cushion. The morning light falls on the wall exactly as it falls, and for a moment you are not watching it from the outside. You are simply part of it.

This is what Dōgen means when he says that myriad things advance and actualize the self. Not that you reach out and grasp reality, but that reality comes forward to include you. The difference between delusion and awakening, in Dōgen’s telling, is not the difference between ignorance and knowledge. It is the difference between carrying yourself forward, trying to impose your agenda on the world, and allowing the world to meet you where you are.

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The Fish, the Bird, the Element

Later in the Genjōkōan, Dōgen offers one of his most luminous images:

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements. When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small. Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm.

The fish does not need to exhaust the ocean before it can truly swim. The bird does not need to traverse the entire sky before it can truly fly. Each one moves freely in its element, right where it is, and that is enough.

I find this passage unbearably tender. Because it says: your life, right now, however small or constrained it may seem to you, is a complete life. You do not need to reach the edge of experience before you can begin to live. You are already swimming. You are already flying.

But Dōgen has a caveat. If the fish leaves the water, it dies. If the bird leaves the air, it dies. No creature fails to realize its own completeness wherever it is, but the moment it abandons its own element, everything collapses.

What is our element? What is the water in which we swim, the air through which we fly? I think it is just this: our own actual life. Our own actual breath. Our own actual experience of sitting, standing, walking, lying down. When we try to live in someone else’s element, when we try to swim in water that is not ours, we begin to die. Not physically, but spiritually. We lose contact with our own aliveness.

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The Conveyor Belt

Part of why this feels so hard is that we are trained to live in sequence. School prepares us for college, college for work. And what does retirement prepare us for? Death? Whatever happened to just learning? Just working? Just doing whatever you are doing?

So often we live as if life is a conveyor belt, with every stage meant to serve the next. Riding it means always looking ahead, always moving forward. Never still, never present. Uchiyama noticed this too. People try to increase their efficiency in every area of life, he observed, but where are they going? Without a clear direction, all that efficiency amounts to nothing more than the buzzing of insects when spring arrives.

Sawaki made the same point with a characteristically earthy image. In Manchuria, he once saw huge dogs pulling carts, driven forward by a piece of meat dangling just in front of their noses. The dog runs like crazy, but it never reaches the meat. It only gets fed after the cart arrives at its destination. Then in a single gulp, it swallows the meat down and starts running again. The similarity to people chasing their next paycheck was, for Sawaki, impossible to miss.

We need to get off the ride. Let go of the comparisons. The question is not how far ahead you are, but whether you are actually here.

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Nothing Happens

This is why zazen can feel so disruptive.

Because it is not oriented toward progress.

You sit down, and nothing happens. You are not improving yourself. You are not being productive. You are not getting any gold stars or spiritual credit. You are just sitting.

And it feels so ordinary, does it not? As mundane as washing dishes or watching clouds drift by. Sometimes we resist the ordinary because the world pushes us toward the extraordinary: to be the best, to chase peak experiences, to never waste time. What really is a “waste of time”? If every moment is life itself, how could any of it be wasted?

Sawaki Roshi once said of himself that he had wasted his whole life in zazen. Uchiyama, reflecting on his teacher after his death, pointed out that most of Sawaki’s followers remembered his wit, his courage, his magnetic personality. But Uchiyama insisted that none of those qualities were the point. The zazen was not a means to the greatness. The zazen was the thing itself. Not one person shut up in a corner of the universe enjoying a private respite from suffering, but an expression of life, as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean or a bird flying in the sky.

When we sit, we are not withdrawing from our element. We are returning to it.

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The Fan

The Genjōkōan closes with a kōan, a teaching story. A monk approaches Zen Master Bao-che, who is fanning himself, and asks: “The nature of wind is permanent and reaches everywhere. Why, then, do you use a fan?”

The master replies: “Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” the monk asks.

The master just keeps fanning himself. The monk bows deeply.

I love this story because it dismantles the most subtle spiritual trap of all: the idea that because our true nature is already complete, we do not need to practice. The wind is always blowing, and Buddha-nature is already present. But that does not mean we can sit back and wait for enlightenment to arrive on its own. The fanning is the wind reaching everywhere. The practice is the realization manifesting itself.

In Sawaki’s terms, roaring or meowing, it must be your own voice. In Uchiyama’s terms, the violet must still become the violet. The fanning and the wind are not two separate things. Practice and realization are not two separate things. Your life and your awakening are not two separate things.

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The Firewood and the Ash

One more teaching from the Genjōkōan, because I think it bears directly on this question of completeness. Dōgen writes:

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is after and the firewood before. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes before and after and is independent of before and after. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes before and after.

Firewood is completely firewood. Ash is completely ash. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, Dōgen says, nor summer the end of spring. Each stage of life, each moment of experience, is complete in itself. It is not merely a prelude to something else.

This is the antidote to the conveyor belt. You are not the draft version of some future, better self. You are the final version, right now, fully expressed. And you will be the final version tomorrow, too, even though tomorrow you will be different. Because firewood is completely firewood, and ash is completely ash. Both are complete. Neither is waiting to become the other.

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Bloom Your Own Flower: Zen Self-Acceptance

So what is the point of this simple yet challenging practice of ours?

It is not to change yourself. It is to live yourself. To inhabit your body, your breath, your life, fully and intimately. Eevee does it. Flowers do it. The fish in the ocean and the birds in the sky do it. Why can we not?

You do not have to know what kind of flower you are. You do not have to be fragrant or symmetrical. You do not even have to bloom on time. Just bloom your own flower. Live your life force all the way out. Not because it is better, not because it is impressive, but because it is yours and you are the only one who can bring you out into the world in this very moment. Nobody else is going to do it. You have to do it.

Not a future version of yourself. Not an idealized version of the Dharma. Just this. This breath. This mind. This crooked little blossom, slowly opening.

Or this tiny gremlin Chihuahua, who barks at balloons like she is saving the world, living the truth of who she is with everything she has got.

Uchiyama wrote, in his commentary on Dōgen’s Bendōwa: “The essence of Buddhism is really the self settling in the self.”

The self settling in the self. Not the self conquering the self, or the self escaping the self, or the self becoming a better version of the self. Just the self, at home in the self, the way a fish is at home in water.

Every breath, every step, every act of showing up: this is where life, practice, and the Way are fully realized. So keep returning to your own life, your own aliveness. Bloom your flower, bark your bark, and inhabit the miracle of this moment.

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Trans experience and Zen practice meet in a simple, radical teaching: ordinary mind is the Way. For me, that means being openly and unapologetically trans is part of the Way itself.

Most of us who practice Zen know Jōshū from the famous breakthrough koan, “Jōshū’s Dog,” a classic that many of us have wrestled with. Jōshū is an incredible teacher in his own right, and he studied under his teacher, Nansen, for forty years.

Nansen is also well known in Zen lore, not just for his sharp teachings, but for the legendary moment when he killed a cat to make a point about attachment and division. While his actions seem harsh at times, they often carried an undercurrent of compassion and a deep desire to free his students from delusion.

The koan I want to explore is Case 19 from the Mumonkan: “Ordinary Mind Is the Way.”

Jōshū earnestly asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”

Nansen answered, “The ordinary mind is the Way.”

Jōshū asked, “Should I direct myself toward it or not?”

Nansen said, “If you try to turn toward it, you go against it.”

Jōshū asked, “If I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it is the Way?”

Nansen answered, “The Way does not belong to knowing or not-knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is a blank consciousness. When you have really reached the true Way beyond all doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as the great empty firmament. How can it be talked about on a level of right and wrong?”

At these words, Jōshū was suddenly enlightened.

Zen and Trans Identity: Ordinary Mind in Practice

There’s a lot to say about this koan. But I want to start by saying this: for me, being openly, unapologetically trans is the Way.

I used to think I knew what the Way was. I was raised in a conservative Catholic household, and the path seemed very clear. If you’re assigned female at birth, like I was, then you are a woman. Full stop. Women marry men. Women have children. They buy houses and cars, work hard and raise our kids. That was the Way I was given. So I followed it.

I got married to my college sweetheart at 23. By 24, we had our first child. A couple years later, we had our second daughter. I got the job, the husband, the kids, the house, the cars, and I was miserable. I was miserable because I wasn’t living the truth of who I was. For a long time, I didn’t even know who I was. I was so deeply conditioned, so deluded by what I thought I knew, that I couldn’t even see the possibility that I might be gay or trans, or both really.

Nansen says, “If you try to turn toward it, you go against it.”

I tried to follow what I thought was the Way. But the harder I leaned into it, the further I drifted from myself. I didn’t know another way to live, and the world around me didn’t offer one.

Over time, the only thing that became truly clear was that I couldn’t go on like that. I reached a breaking point. When my daughters were three and one, I left my marriage. I felt like I had let all three of them down. It’s hard to let people down, isn’t it? It’s even harder when they’re the people you love the most in this world.

It was the most difficult time of my life. It took a toll on all four of us. There was a lot of pain. And still, there was no other way forward.

For years, I clung to ideas about what was right, what was good, what was responsible. About gender, about sexual orientation, about family, about religion, about what makes a life meaningful. But that kind of knowing, rigid, inherited, unquestioned, was its own kind of suffering.

As Nansen says in this koan, “Knowing is delusion; not knowing is a blank consciousness.” The Way isn’t about certainty. It’s about releasing our grip on fixed ideas and taking the next step anyway.

In the end, my choice wasn’t about knowing, but it was about listening to ordinary mind. It was about releasing the need to know, and taking a single, trembling step forward.

When I first read this koan, I was struck by Jōshū’s question, “If I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it is the Way?” Like Jōshū, I’m someone who wants to try. I want to figure it out. I want to know I’m on the right path, especially right now in our country when the stakes are so high, when people’s lives are on the line.

One of the very first acts of those in power was to sign an executive order declaring there are only two “unchangeable sexes,” reaffirming a fixed and binary view of gender. For those of us who live beyond or between those categories, this is more than just policy. It is a denial of existence. It’s violence dressed up as order.

We often want someone to just give us the answer, to tell us what to do. But in this koan, the teacher doesn’t answer with certainty. Nansen doesn’t say, “Here’s the right action. Here’s the policy to support. Here’s how to be a good ally. Here’s how to make it better.” He says, “The Way does not belong to knowing or not-knowing.”

So how do we act when we don’t know or when we think we do know? When we think we’re right and others are wrong. How do we meet a moment that feels broken, cruel, overwhelming, when we don’t know the way out?

This sounds like a koan to me, but not one from any curriculum. One of many that life gives us in ample supply.

Zen doesn’t offer answers, but it does offer a path. We call it upaya: skillful means, or more simply, skillful action, which is a part of upaya.

Skillful action doesn’t mean always knowing the perfect thing to do. It means meeting each moment with clarity, compassion, and wisdom. It means responding to suffering not with reactivity, but with care. It means asking: What alleviates harm? What brings liberation? What supports awakening, not just for me, but for all beings?

Upaya is the heart of our Bodhisattva vows. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s responsive, dynamic, alive, and different for each of us. In the face of injustice, upaya is how we act without hardening our hearts. In the face of fear, it’s how we keep showing up, anyway. You might say that upaya is ordinary mind in motion.

So, how do we practice this? How can we respond skillfully to this moment, and so many others like it in our country? How do we respond as trans people, as allies, as human beings?

As I’ve been reflecting on how we meet this moment with skillful action, I kept coming back to something central to Zen practice: two touchstones, actually.

The Heart Sutra, which tells us that Avalokiteshvara, our Bodhisattva of Compassion, saw clearly the emptiness of all the five conditions, and became free of fear.

And our Four Great Vows, which are impossibly big and intimate. We vow to save all sentient beings, end all desires, master the dharmas, and attain the buddha way.

From these two texts, a kind of map began to emerge: three qualities that feel essential to practicing skillful action in this moment. I call them the Three Cs.

Clarity, Compassion, and Courage.

Clarity, because we vow to master the boundless dharmas. We vow to see clearly, to study the causes of suffering, to wake up to what’s really happening, not what we wish were happening.

Compassion, because we vow to save all beings. And because Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion, teaches us that true compassion begins with seeing deeply.

Courage, because we vow to attain the Way even though it is said to be unattainable. Because to live without fear, as the Heart Sutra says, requires great heart, literally great courage.

These Three Cs are not separate. They arise together, just as form and emptiness do. They help us respond not from reactivity, but from vow. From practice. From love.

Clarity and Discernment

First, we look clearly. We don’t turn away. We name what’s happening, not from a place of hate or judgment, but from a deep vow to wake up.

We see that this attack isn’t just on trans people. It’s an attack on the sacred truth of impermanence, of non-self. Buddhism teaches that all forms are empty of fixed identity. How can a government say anything is “unchangeable”? That’s delusion. That’s suffering.

And I say this as someone who once tried so hard to “know the Way” that I nearly lost myself. That kind of knowing is delusion. Seeing clearly is not the same as knowing in the dualistic sense. It’s meeting things directly, just as they are, before right or wrong. That’s clarity.

As a trans person, I know in my bones that identity is fluid, emergent, not fixed. That doesn’t make me confused. It means I’ve been forced to reckon with impermanence in a visceral way. My life is my teacher, one of my teachers.

I think of my intersex friend. His body defies the binary. Nature itself defies the binary. It’s biology. It’s reality.

And I think of my own body: assigned female at birth, pregnant twice, top surgery later. Long hair, short hair. Sometimes dresses, sometimes suits.

Each form, each moment, true and real. None of it fixed. None of it the whole story.

In Zen, we say that mind and body are not two, not one. My mind and body have sometimes felt at odds, but they are inseparable parts of who I am.

Living this way has forced me to let go of certainty. To stay close to the rawness of experience. To ask, again and again: what’s true in this moment?

This is where we turn to the Dharma.

We use it to discern: What’s illusion, and what’s truth? What’s ego, and what’s liberation? We cultivate the wisdom to say: These policies are rooted in delusion. This suffering is not inevitable.

We can act. We must act.

This is how we begin to master the boundless dharmas, not all at once, but one moment of clarity at a time.

Compassion and Connection

The second foundation of skillful action is compassion. In our practice, compassion is not sentimental. It’s relational. It’s the deep recognition that there is no separation between us. It’s being willing to open the heart to suffering, not just our own, but others’, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.

I want to tell you a story.

A couple of years ago, I attended a major professional conference at the Washington Convention Center. I had just registered and was walking the venue in my suit and tie, what I often call my armor. I’d had top surgery well before this, the suit fit perfectly, and I felt deeply at home in myself.

And then I had to pee.

For most people, choosing a restroom is a non-event. But for me, a non-binary person, it’s a constant reminder that the world still insists I choose between two doors that don’t tell the whole story of who I am. “What is the Way?” I wondered. I wasn’t yet comfortable using the men’s room, so I approached the women’s room like I always had.

But I wasn’t dressed like I always had been.

As I walked toward a stall, a woman screamed. She shouted that I was in the wrong bathroom and said she was calling security. At that moment, my armor felt paper-thin. She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She was afraid. Afraid of what didn’t fit into her categories. I wasn’t exactly afraid of her, but I was devastated that my mere existence could make someone else feel unsafe.

I could’ve yelled back. I could’ve shut down. I could’ve let her fear become my shame. I really wanted to do those things.

Instead, I asked myself again: What is the Way?

It was the same question I’d been sitting with moments before, but now it wasn’t about gender, or presentation, or where I belonged. It came from a deeper place. The essential point of view. Ordinary mind.

And I remembered: she is me. I am her.

We are not one, not two.

She was caught in delusion, yes, but I’ve been caught too. Not in the same way, and not with the same impact, but I’ve felt the pull of fear. I’ve known what it is to want things to be simpler than they are, to wish I could fit more neatly into the expectations around me. That doesn’t mean her behavior wasn’t harmful. It was. But compassion allowed me to see her humanity without abandoning my own.

And this, I believe, is a place where our practice calls for real honesty. If we’re truly committed to the Way, we’re asked to see ourselves in others, not just those we love or agree with, but even those we struggle with. Even those whose fear turns into cruelty. Even those who make policies that harm us or the people we care about.

Seeing them doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It doesn’t mean accepting injustice. It means recognizing that they, too, are caught in the conditions of suffering. They, too, are subject to delusion. They, too, inherently have ordinary mind.

That’s the radical demand of the Way. It’s not passive. It’s not permissive. It’s powerful. It insists: We are not one. Not two. And if we are sincere in our vows, we have to practice as if that’s true.

This is how we take up the vow to save all beings. Even the ones who don’t see us clearly. Even the ones who don’t yet see themselves clearly.

Courage and Accountability

And finally: skillful action means courage. It means taking a stand, not from ego or anger, but from our Bodhisattva vows.

As a practitioner, I don’t take this lightly. It means I carry our traditions with me and ask myself daily: What does it mean to embody the Dharma right now? Not 100 years ago. Not just in theory. Right now. In this America. In this body. In this community.

Right now, trans children across this country are being stripped of access to healthcare. A recent Supreme Court ruling upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for minors. This is not just abstract policy. It is suffering made law. It means young people who are simply trying to live authentically can now be denied gender-affirming care supported by clinical guidelines. Some will be forced to hide or suppress themselves. Some will be forced to detransition. Some will be pushed into despair. Some will die.

And I want to say this plainly: Gender-affirming healthcare saved my life. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean that it was helpful or nice or affirming in some notional way. I mean I would not be here today if I hadn’t had access to it. It breathed life back into me. It gave me a sense of belonging to my own body. It allowed me to want to keep living.

And I say that as someone who is white. Who is financially secure. Who lives in Maryland, a state that, so far, has protected trans rights. If it was this hard for me, with every structural advantage, how much harder must it be for someone who doesn’t have the resources and circumstances that I do?

That’s why this matters. This is not a distant issue. It is the suffering of real people. Some of them are our children. Some of them are our friends and neighbors. As students of the Way, we vow to end suffering, not to look away from it. Not to rationalize it. Not to hide behind spiritual detachment or polite neutrality.

Skillful action means we see clearly what is happening, we open our hearts to the pain it causes, and then we ask: What is my role? How do I respond?

This is how we step toward the unattainable Buddha Way, with courage, with sincerity, with vow as our guide.

We all have koans. Mine is gender. Yours may be grief, or addiction, or aging. Racism, parenting, isolation, or illness. Whatever it is, don’t turn away. Live it. Let it teach you.

The Way is not about fixing ourselves. There is nothing to fix. It’s about showing up for reality as it is.

When we embrace the Way, we realize something radical:

There is no contradiction between being different and being whole. No contradiction between being vulnerable and powerful. No contradiction between knowing who you are and letting go of who you are.

We can hold many truths at once. We can be all of it.

And still: not one, not two.

Ordinary mind contains it all. It invites us to let go of striving and simply trust the flow of life as it is, beyond distinctions of right and wrong, beyond fixed notions of identity.

Skillful action doesn’t always have answers. But it does have direction. It moves toward the truth. It meets the moment.

Nansen says the Way can’t be talked about in terms of right and wrong. That’s because it’s bigger. Vaster. “Boundless as the great empty firmament.” The Way isn’t a fixed path. It’s living. Responsive. Intimate.

Ordinary mind is not bound by one or two. It walks freely in the space between.

It’s not a mind full of certainty or a mind that clings to identity.

It listens to a friend cry. It folds laundry. It forgets what it came into the room for.

It walks the dog. It sings in the car. It says “I don’t know.”

It cannot be legislated, erased, or reduced to binary categories.

And perhaps most importantly, ordinary mind acts.

This isn’t abstraction. This is our life.

So the question is:

Are we brave enough to be ourselves? To let go of what we think we know? To meet the world, as imperfect as it is, and yet still vow to heal it?

May we meet this world with ordinary mind. May we meet it with clarity, compassion, and courage. And may we walk the Way, together.

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